For a while, it seemed that it was possible to do nothing. Viggo Mortensen, 64, came third among the four authors on stage and sat in the third chair –two gray and two red; he in a gray one. The auditorium, full, applauded with hardly any shouting or fuss. It was a loud applause, though in no way different or unusually long. The first poet, Gabriela Luzzi, began to recite; continued the second writer, José Villa; The third was Mortensen, who, unlike the other two, began to read without saying anything before:
–After trying to write poetry for almost fifty years, I conclude that a poem is the flower of lies that words are. They never reach, they do not faithfully represent what I think or feel. For example: María’s hair / in the blond plane / blue at night / following the sea.
He read from some A4 size loose sheets that he had pressed in a red notebook, smaller than the pages. The text that starts like this is Maria’s hairfrom his most recent book of poems, branches for a nest, which the actor presented a few days ago in Bahía Blanca, a city in the south of the province of Buenos Aires; on Sunday he did it in the capital. Now, this Monday, he read it to two hundred people on a stage at the Borges Cultural Center, in downtown Buenos Aires. The book is the first that the American interpreter publishes in Argentina and is published by Lux Editionswhich promotes the work of contemporary authors from Latin America and also translated authors.
“The poets that are going to read today are poets that make up our catalogue, they are also friends; Some come from afar, as you know… But he is fully integrated into our poetry, we consider him an Argentine poet, ”the editor Gustavo López had said minutes before the reading began, about the presence of Mortensen. The actor was sitting there, being on stage what a superstar is not usually. He was dressed in urban sneakers, Jean of course, a blue shirt and a T-shirt under the shirt that joked with a hypothetical candidacy for the US elections of Frodo and Sam, characters from the trilogy The Lord of the ringsby Peter Jackson, which consolidated him, in the role of Aragorn, as a planetary star.
When Mortensen finished reading his first text, the poet Gabriela Bejerman continued, reciting standing up and from memory. The reading kept spinning between the four of them. She read Luzzi again and then Villa and then Mortensen.
In the third round, the actor intervened for the first time to thank the other poets and dedicate the next text to the Huracán soccer club. Huracán is the classic rival of San Lorenzo, the Argentine team that Mortensen has tattooed on his right arm. “It’s not bad milk, not at all,” the actor, who speaks Spanish perfectly, clarified before starting to read, and continued: “I want him to beat Boca, I want the cousin from the neighborhood to stay in first place. Because if not, what do we do? His wishes were not fulfilled and Boca won 1-0.
–Disenchantment / has a box / at the top / of the room / in the shade / where / the flies sleep–, he began to read.
that text, Pavese’s penis a “long poem about the personal hell of the last days of [Cesare] Pavese”, the Italian writer who committed suicide in 1950. The Argentinean Fabián Casas defines him this way in the book’s prologue. There, Casas narrates the joy that receiving postcards from the actor, his friend, caused him during the pandemic: “They were, for example, a long rectangle of shiny paper, in the shape of a marker that on the other side instead of a landscape there was only the name of a brand of weed”. One day, in addition, a parcel arrived with the poems that made a book and that is this one that was finished printing in June of this year.
“I never confuse friendship with what I read, sometimes my friends write things that seem like shit to me and if they ask me for my opinion I give it to them,” Casas writes in the prologue. But Mortensen’s poetry seemed “so incredible”: “The poems (…), written at different times and dated at the bottom, shook me.” The project began to take the form of a book in 2017, Gustavo López, who has worked with Mortensen for 20 years, tells by phone. “We were gathering poems and correcting them. Viggo did a very dedicated job on each text. It was all very relaxed, in the times that he could, ”he adds. In June, the Bahia publishing house made the first print run of 1,000 copies.
This is not Mortensen’s first book of poetry –Ten Last Night (1993), winter songs (2010), eudaimonia (2021), among others–, but it is the first to be published in Argentina, the country where he arrived with his family at the age of 11. Her father came to work in Chaco, in the north of the country, and when the couple broke up, the children returned with their mother to New York. It is said of Mortensen that he is discreet, sensitive and versatile. As well as an actor – he has been nominated for three Oscars for dangerous promises (2007), captain fantastic (2016) and Green Book (2018)– and a poet, he is an editor, photographer, painter, music composer… He founded his own publishing house in 2002 and in 2020 he directed his first film, fallingwhich he also wrote, produced and starred in.
The audience continued devoted to the readings, applauding all the authors equally, without greater demonstrations of fanaticism than some “Come on, Viggo!”. The poet Gabriela Bejerman began to break the illusion of normality near the end when she spontaneously rewrote the lyrics of a text she was reciting. “I know that this is your entourage, Viggo,” she said and encouraged the audience to complete the verse with the logic of the rest of the poem. “I know so, I know so,” the audience responded in unison. The poet Gabriela Luzzi brought him back to the fore, minutes later, when she took the microphone and asked him: “When did you get here, Viggo? Since we’re all here, tell us.” The actor replied that 15 days ago, he had been in Bahía Blanca and in Buenos Aires. And they did one more round of readings.
In the end it was already impossible to act as if nothing had happened. The queue that formed for the signing of copies after the event turned around on the second floor of the cultural center with the name of an Argentine writer. Most had bought his copy, which costs 5,000 Argentine pesos, about 20 dollars in the official exchange rate, when they left the room. There were fans dressed as hobbits, mothers who disputed with their son the ownership of an autographed book, excited, nervous, disrespectful, shy… Also a worker from the Father Lorenzo Massa Parish, who had brought the actor a cap and a little card. Mortensen helped finance that parish, which is named after the founder of his passion club. On the stamp, more poetry: “Afternoon falls in Almagro / the last mate is brewed in Boedo / The sky is azulgrana / mosaic of hopes”.
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